The first edition of the Istanbul Design Biennial (October 13th - December 12th) brings a plethora of fascinating projects by promising Turkish designers and architects to the surface.

In yesterday's ShowCase feature, we published the interactive kinetic installation Cerebral Hut by Guvenc Ozel, and today's project is Augmented Structures v2.0, a media installation based on Istanbul's urban texture which reveals invisible information through soundscape and data mapping. The installation was designed by young Turkish architect Alper Derinbogaz and media artist/designer Refik Anadol (who some may recognize as part of the photographer team GRIDUO which we featured in our In Focus series a while ago).

Augmented Structures v2.0 is currently on view at Istanbul Modern | Istanbul Museum of Modern Art.

Project Description from Refik Anadol and Alper Derinbogaz:

Augmented Structures v2.0 as Distilled Urban Experience is a project by Refik Anadol and Alper Derinboğaz which focuses on two dissimilar regions in İstanbul and displays the inner characteristics of which one is an urban texture inside city center that has gone under a bottom-up transformation recently and the other which is a suburban region consisted of gated communities. The project based on soundscape and data mapping of two regions reveals the invisible information about their context and suggests an alternative way to understand the existence of city through new media technologies.

The project brings together disparate disciplines like sound, architecture and the visual arts which influence one another to such a degree that it is impossible to separate them. While the project reexamines the world in visual and aesthetic terms, in its capacity as an “interdisciplinary transformation” project, it also questions the point where art and architecture stand today and the point they might reach in future.

Augmented Structures series forces each discipline to alter its own “material” state; transforming sound into mathematics, mathematics into architecture, and architecture into a living structure, while presenting the viewer with a new media experience that is multi-levelled, produces sound, moves, and breathes.

The team is diversified by sound designer Kerim Karaoglu and parametric designers Coşku Cinkılıç, Koray Bingöl.

Thanks to IKSV, Emre Arolat, Nil Aynalı, Özlem Yalım Özkaraoğlu, Salon2, Antilop, Can Buyukberber.